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Summary: The worst privacy violator in the world and the firm behind LSE failures are pocketing as much as £0.35 billion of British taxpayers’ money to acquire access to very sensitive data of British people

IT IS being reported in the British media that the NHS, which is gradually moving to adopt more and more Free/libre software, has just given a contract to Microsoft minion Accenture (article by IDG). £0.35 billion are to be spent on mail alone; that’s just crazy! That’s a big — even colossal! — mistake for the NHS to make when budget is tight and the Conservatives try to kill or privatise it. A lot of money for Microsoft/Accenture means that a degree of privatisation is happening here. “The same crew that did in the stock exchange,” iophk notes regarding the role played by Accenture. The article says “NHSmail has almost a million registered accounts and 730,000 active users. It has been running on Microsoft’s Exchange platform since 2009. Accenture is yet to confirm which IT systems it will use.” What a ripoff. £0.35 billion for less than a million users? What a heist! They should have gone with Free software and a British Free software consultancy. But since Conservatives like Cameron insist that encryption is such a nasty thing, no wonder an insecure proprietary alternative might be sought. Need PRISM (and by extension the NSA) be mentioned here?

Several days ago an article was published titled “The NHS must embrace open source to improve”. No doubt that’s true. The article says: “This is according to CIO at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust Rachel Dunscombe, who we recently caught up with to learn more about the transformation facing the UK healthcare system.

“Dunscombe told us that she is a strong supporter of open source in the NHS because it removes many of the risks presented by using proprietary products.”

The risks presented by proprietary products are not just to budget (disproportionately high cost) but also to patients. There have been stories about unencrypted data leaks and this new report from the British press [via Slashdot, which amended the post], calling out Windows, recalls Stuxnet and shows how using Microsoft Windows yourself helps your enemies (espionage): “Malware probers Tillmann Werner, of Crowdstrike, and Felix Leder, of BlueCoat, say the clever cyber-spy tool – said to have put back Iran’s nuclear program by two years – was on the brink of failure thanks to buggy code.

“Stuxnet had to remain undetected to the Iranians or else it would have blown the operation. Unfortunately, a programming blunder would have allowed it to spread to PCs running older and unsupported versions of Windows, and probably causing them to crash as a result. Those blue screens of death would have raised suspicions at the Natanz nuclear lab.”

And Windows continues to be used in British healthcare. This is insane. Another report from IDG in the UK helps Microsoft pretend to care about privacy (see “Microsoft moves to address customers’ concerns about cloud control and transparency”) while it’s actively providing the NSA with back doors, such as those which enabled sabotage in Iran.

If the NHS is serious about money savings and about privacy of patients, then it must immediately drop Windows and other Microsoft traps. As this British report from the other day serves to remind us, Windows ‘sales’ still are falling, largely due to GNU/Linux. It says that “Microsoft has weathered a tough three months, and despite signs of growth in cloud computing, Redmond saw its sales dragged down by dwindling demand from consumers.” Now recall the article above, “Microsoft moves to address customers’ concerns about cloud control and transparency”. Microsoft now wants the NHS to give Microsoft its data, using buzzwords like the ‘cloud’ nonsense. It is clear that the NHS should reject all that and just self-host using Free/libre Open Source software instead. It would cost far less than £0.35 billion and be more reliable, secure, etc. █

Summary: How the increased reliance of proprietary software for E-mails breeds abuse at the higher levels while hurting those who are vulnerable

COMPANIES and individuals who rely on Free software for their E-mail needs rarely lose any mail. The protocols, the software and the failovers are generally robust. They are well tested and widely used. There is usually redundancy built in and the costs of this redundancy is low.

When one relies on Microsoft for E-mails one can end up in prison and deported, as this recent case taught us. Microsoft’s E-mail infrastructure is ripe for surveillance abuses even by Microsoft itself. Blunders relating to lost mail often trace back to Microsoft and it’s too easy to see why. Any business that uses Microsoft for storing and relaying E-mail is settling for an office is almost as bad as Microsoft Office. It boggles the mind; why do people put such trash in offices? It’s a Trojan horse to communications. Most mail filtering and antivirus products are used specifically to tackle Microsoft issues (zombie PCs and Windows malware). Free software overcomes many of these complications and it is more efficient, economic, and robust.

“Free software overcomes many of these complications and it is more efficient, economic, and robust.”The other day offices that rely on Microsoft for mail came to a standstill. Any office that “relies heavily on Microsoft Outlook,” as the article put it, was unable to get anything done. “LOL,” wrote a reader of ours, “rely and Microsoft in the same sentence”.

This reader previously drew our attention to the way Microsoft’s broken mail software saved the Bush family from embarrassment (deleting evidence). Spot the pattern here. Here is another new report about Microsoft mail going down pretty badly and staying down for a whole business day. “In outages this week,” says the Microsoft-friendly site, “Microsoft’s online Exchange service was down for nine hours, crippling Office 365 and hosted Outlook accounts across North America and Mexico, just after its unified communications service also crashed.”

Microsoft’s hosted services can only be as reliable as the underlying software, which is simply not reliable. Why would anyone at all want to use hosted Microsoft services? Downtimes are just too frequent and we used to cover them regularly. Watch a Microsoft-affiliated site (Fool.com) thinking that Ubuntu users will give Microsoft their files for hosting. Only a fool would do that, or one whose goal is to have the files spied if not altogether lost.

Then subject of lost E-mail is very hot at the moment because of stories relating to the IRS and NSA, Microsoft’s special ally for well over a decade. Here is some of the latest:

During a hearing held yesterday by the House Oversight Committee, Committee Chairman Darrel Issa said that it was “unbelievable” that the IRS had lost the e-mails of former IRS official Lois Lerner. While Congressman Issa is not generally ignorant on tech issues, he’s clearly not familiar with just how believable such a screw-up is.

“A retention policy designed to ensure that mail is lost” is what our reader called it. Maybe they too used Microsoft, but it is hard to tell for sure. IRS recently signed a big Microsoft deal, so it is a Windows shop (we covered this at the time, only months ago).

The bottom line is, Microsoft’s E-mail infrastructure breeds abuse. It is easy to claim that some “computer crash” (read: Windows issues) made evidence of crime disappear and when one who is vulnerable uses Microsoft for mail it is clear that those in power will be able to retrieve a lot to be used against the individual. Proprietary software tends to work against its users and in favour of the software ‘masters’. E-mail is a great example of this. █

Mailbox down the drain

Summary: How a Free software Exchange/Outlook challenger became an obscure option with no FOSS identity

According to this report from VAR Guy, the Zimbra shuffle continues:

VMware (VMW) has sold Zimbra, its Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange alternative, to Telligent. The VAR Guy isn’t shocked, considering VMware has been selling off non-core assets and Zimbra’s website had barely been updated this year. But what exactly does Zimbra’s sale mean to VMware and its channel partners? Here’s the analysis.

Zimbra was already in the hands of two Microsoft-inflitrated companies, Yahoo and VMware, and it never really made the impact it deserved to make. Back in the days it was marketed as FOSS, but this is no longer the case. The above article says that “Telligent — which focuses on enterprise social software — has acquired Zimbra. And going forward, Telligent will be known as Zimbra. Telligent CEO Patrick Brandt will lead the combined company. It sounds like Intel Capital, NXT Capital Venture Finance, BDCA, Hall Financial Group and VMware will each invest in the new Zimbra — which offers a “unified social collaboration suite built for the post-PC era.””

“Zimbra is no longer what it claimed to be, but some FOSS-backing companies like Red Hat use it.”This is interesting. So the company will be known as the product it just bought? Either way, no word is said about Free/open source software, which was the key proposition of this company way back in the days. The new owner is, according to Wikipedia, “previously a founding member of Microsoft’s ASP.NET team and helped build and run the Microsoft ASP.NET community.”

That’s reassuring, isn’t it?

Kolab would be a good option for those seeking a Free software option in this area. Zimbra is no longer what it claimed to be, but some FOSS-backing companies like Red Hat use it. █

Summary: Another hypocritical attack of Microsoft against Google, this time in Boston

THE home of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the principal battleground for Microsoft's anti-ODF wars in the US is going to abandon Microsoft. Relation expected, right? Microsoft, as we saw before, is getting all nasty about it.

Well, “despite the Anti-Google FUD-slinging” Boston will ditch Exchange: “Faced with the choice of saving serious money or buying a load of FUD, the City of Boston has become the latest enterprise customer to dump Microsoft Exchange in favor of Google Apps.

“The thing to do is not to learn from Boston’s government branches but from the Boston-based FSF.”“And the city’s 20,000 employees won’t be the last to make this move until Microsoft either closes the cost chasm or comes up with a scarier story.”

Here is more: “THE CITY OF BOSTON has switched its 20,000 employees from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail in a move that will save $280,000 a year.”

Neither choice is acceptable. They are both proprietary and not privacy-respecting. So on what grounds does Microsoft attack Google? The same was done by Novell and Microsoft in California. They are all hypocrites because Microsoft itself is trying to do exactly what Google is doing.

The thing to do is not to learn from Boston’s government branches but from the Boston-based FSF. What they need is encrypted, self-hosted, FOSS-based mail. Later in the week we shall write about some newly-discovered Microsoft surveillance. Microsoft is a lot worse than Google when it comes to privacy. █

Summary: Microsoft’s Linux internment and Microsoft Linux (SUSE) in the news; a little bit about GroupWise too

MICROSOFT has been creating its own internment pen for GNU/Linux users and it is looking to hire a mole to handle operations and lure some innocent sheep in.

As Microsoft boosters put it, Microsoft has Red Hat customers in sight. Microsoft already taxes Red Hat Linux (servers) at Amazon and now on its own turf it is trying to take this extortion further. Aiding Microsoft’s efforts we have had SUSE for a while, but fortunately Dell is moving away from that (although not to the right system, feeding Oracle instead). From a new page:

How Dell Migrated from SUSE Linux to Oracle Linux

Switching the underlying operating system on a single server is not trivial. Neither is dealing with the related conversion and compatibility issues. Imagine what’s involved in switching the operating system on thousands of servers spread globally across an enterprise, like Dell just did.

The good news here is that Dell itself won’t pay Microsoft tax (for its own systems), but at the same time Dell is actively promoting Microsoft-taxed Linux for OEMs solution, which troubles us a bit. It’s a signed deal which has the VAR Guy arguing about SUSE Studio:

Dell Servers Embrace SUSE Linux, But SUSE Studio Is Real Story

[...]

No doubt, Dell has relationships with multiple Linux distributions — including SUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Canonical Ubuntu. But SUSE apparently is the “first Linux vendor” in the Dell OEM Technology Partner program.

Sort of makes you wonder: Is something deeper brewing between Dell and SUSE? Hmmm…

This is just another reason to actually avoid Dell, but Joe Brockmeier, the former Novell employee, is promoting this. VAR Guy, who has also been close to Novell over the years, goes ahead and promotes GroupWise, which sane Web sites say nobody cares about anymore (and they are right). To quote:

No One Cares That Novell Has A New Version of GroupWise

Today Novell released its 2012 version of its email software GroupWise, and the announcement was greeted by most with a big yawn. GroupWise? Seems so last century. (Actually, the last updates to the software were for version 8 back in 2008-2010.) According to one analyst, “GroupWise has 10,000 customers and is used by 47 of the 50 US state governments.” It has been a distant third to Exchange and Lotus Notes for a while, and many GroupWise customers have switched over to Google Apps in the past several years.

GroupWise is proprietary and it distracts from Free/Open Source options that work equally well or better. GroupWise — like SUSE — is a solution in search of a problem, much like OpenSUSE when it looks for other people’s work again (trying to ape Linux Mint in this case). SUSE over the past 5+ years has been just a product for Microsoft to tax GNU/Linux through. It lacks technical merit/advantage and the latest release of OpenSUSE — as put in this new review — “was released too early. Period.” Boycott Novell and boycott SUSE. █

Summary: A roundup of December stories where companies or institutions dump Novell and also make it known

THE tracking of Novell’s demise is made hard by the fact that it went private. It is also made hard by the fact that companies which dump Novell need not make it publicly known. But we do our best to collect anecdotal evidence and this post will supply some.

Here is an article from December that says:

The new Active Directory, which took the place of Novell to store network accounts, became visible this year. Users now log on to campus computers using an Active Directory account and their Netpass username and password.

Here is another one:

The much-maligned Novell GroupWise e-mail program may soon become a thing of Smith’s past: ITS is considering switching to the Google Apps for Education platform. Smith has used GroupWise since September 2000, though over the years many students have expressed dissatisfaction with the program’s organizational system and size limitations.

Here is a massive loss for Novell:

The council is replacing Novell’s Groupwise collaboration tool and Microsoft’s word processing and spreadsheet software for its 3,500 staff, it said in a statement. The switch is expected to save the council £3 million over the next four years.

They are getting rid of GroupWise:

Research by the council’s IT department earlier this year found two viable options for the shift: Microsoft Office 365 and Google. A tender was put out in July to find a company to help migrate the council from its current Novell GroupWise system to one of those two solutions, including supplying licensing, and the winner was the London-based Google reseller Cloudreach.

In LA, after a fuss was made, it turns out that:

Google will pay up to $350,000 per year for those employees to use that system, which is run by Novell, a competitor.

It took a lot of smears against Google to achieve this. Proprietary Groupwise is not necessarily more privacy-respecting than Google. They ought to just deploy Free software, instead. Here is more background information [1, 2], which meets the chagrin of Microsoft boosters. It should not be about security because proprietary software that is native has security problems too. Anyway, it may be too late to reverse this decision. Groupwise might live another day in LA. As for Novell’s other proprietary software, one article says that in provisioning “Key vendors dominating this market space include Oracle Corp., IBM Corp., CA Technologies, and Novell Inc.” How long for? Attachmate is too passive.

Regarding proprietary identity management, Novell is mentioned here. Remember that Attachmate does not promote Novell products, so those pieces of software are in a terminal state right now.

Quoting one last new article:

Licensing revenues are also derived from arrangements in which we enable third party technology, such as solutions from Novell, to be used with our OEM partners’ products.

At Novell, proprietary software is what everything is about, except the incubation known as OpenSUSE. █

Summary: An accumulation of news about Novell, focusing on particular themes

New Novell Videos

GroupWise still has some new videos posted about it, e.g. [1, 2, 3] to name the latest. While it is true that a new version is coming, not many changes will be introduced. GroupWise is a dying product with a shrinking userbase.

“Novell Productions” might be a trademark violation in another, separate new video on YouTube, but the Novell brand is a dying brand anyway. It’s coming to be known as Attachmate — whatever does not get liquidated or shut down. There are other new Novell videos, but some are in Polish or are short clips from/about India. It has been a long time since we last saw Teaming mentioned, but here it is again (“Netflex Success Story for Novell Teaming + Conferencing”).

Goodbye Groupwise?

There was a heap of material in the news again about LA’s planned move to Google (from Novell) To quote one example:

The amended contract requires Google to pay for the police and related agencies to stay on Novell GroupWise till November 2012. Google was already footing the Groupwise bill through June 20, 2011. The cost to Google could be several million dollars. But the blow to Google’s reputation as a provider of safe and secure email and collaboration could be far higher.

Over a year ago we showed how both Novell and Microsoft spread FUD to derail this move. It was all over the news in the middle/end of last month:

The letter, dated Aug. 17, 2011, but confidential until now, essentially says Google is responsible for paying for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)’s Novell GroupWise deployment through November 2012.

More information can be found in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].

Goodbye Novell

In the new we still find former Novell staff that finds a new home by moving to other companies. We also find former Novell staff in Allegiance now. To quote:

The company has named Jason Taylor, formerly with Omniture and Novell, as executive vice president of engineering.

Here is another news story about Novell getting the boot:

The project started four years ago when the University realised it was going to have to replace its aging mish-mash of legacy systems based around conventional PCs and obsolete technology such as Novell’s Netware.

Guess who is moving to Microsoft? Former customers of Novell:

“In moving from Novell to Microsoft for our back end, we had a blank slate,” says Johnson. The organization decided to move from systems-based downloads for applications to user-based downloads. In other words, end users can choose from a library of pre-approved software that they download themselves.

With Attachmate in charge, it is almost guaranteed that Novell’s old business will evaporate one client at a time. █

Summary: The decline of GroupWise is made apparent by more departures from it, even self-professed analysts who point out the obvious

IT HAS BEEN quite a long time since the last GroupWise release. GroupWise is not cared for all that much anymore. It still has some legacy userbase, but that too is forever eroding.

The firm known as Gartner (which sells bias or points out the obvious) mentions the obvious decline of Novell in E-mail. It doesn’t take analysts to see this, but the news sites do like to reprint Gartner ‘research’ (which it does for paying customers to advance their objectives, not with objective analysis).

There were many ways to redress this so-called ‘study’, e.g. promoting Gmail, but nobody could deny the fall of GroupWise.

Moving on to another new article:

Following a regular IT product selection process, Schelp says a decision was reached whereby SBS would migrate off its existing Novell GroupWise e-mail and groupware suite to Microsoft’s Office 365 Cloud service for some 1300 user accounts.

Here is another one: “That was more or less how things shook out at Lincoln Property Co., said CIO Jay Kenney about the Dallas-based management company’s switching in 2010 from an in-house Novell GroupWise email system to Google Apps for its 4,000 employees.”

And another new story: “Brisbane City Council has undertaken a major project to migrate up to 8,500 desktop users off its Novell GroupWise email system to Microsoft Exchange.”

More on Bisbane from other sources (“Brisbane City Council culls GroupWise”): “Gartner suggests that Novell’s GroupWise and IBM’s Lotus Notes have lost momentum in the enterprise market in recent years, and this has made room for Google to prosper.”

There is a lot of evidence that makes Gartner’s so-called ‘research’ less than insightful and as another article puts it:

In a statement, the analyst house says classic stalwarts like Novell and IBM with its Lotus Notes have “lost market momentum”, while Cisco shut its effort down.

GWAVACon will carry on despite the fall of GroupWise, but how long for? They have a special speaker: “Flynn was appointed President and General Manager of Novell. He has worked for over 30 years in the IT industry, spending the past 13 years with the Attachmate Group.”

How come Attachmate does almost nothing to improve GroupWise? It is not even trying. █

Summary: A long look at the past week’s news confirms a trend involving the collapse of Novell’s products, staff, and clients base

Attachmate never promised much to Novell staff. A lot of the staff got laid off and many others — managers included — moved on in their careers. In the news these days we continue to spot former Novell staff like this one and this other bunch including Stafford Massie. Rather than help Microsoft’s slave, Novell, they actually do something better somewhere else.

Based on this article, “Ivancic said that prior to the acquisition, Novell products competed with each other for resources, leaving legacy applications like GroupWise and NetWare in the cold.”

Well, they still are “in the cold.” We heard nothing about GroupWise from Attachmate. In fact, GroupWise has just been dumped again, this time in District 719. To quote:

The District 719 School Board approved a $160,849 multi-part project to update the district’s current systems. The initiative includes upgrading the district server infrastructure, migrating email service to Microsoft Outlook from Novell GroupWise and developing a hosted archive for correspondence and e-mail communication.

So Microsoft benefits, as usual.

“Attachmate has also officially killed some Novell products other than Mono.”GroupWise is generally dying and even its key staff has been leaving. As one new article puts it, “Canada currently uses three different email platforms: 80% of departments use Microsoft Outlook, 15% use Lotus Notes, and 5% use Novell Groupwise. As a result, departments have adopted a variety of email rules and practices, which results in duplication of effort and less secure email, the government noted.”

Attachmate has also officially killed some Novell products other than Mono. But someone ends up promoting Vibe even after it’s officially dead. It makes no sense.

Attachmate has been replacing many Novell managers with some of its own people. Here is another shuffle:

After the take-over of Novell in April, the Attachmate Group shuffled a number of its high profile executive roles, including the appointment of former NZ general manager, Boris Ivancic to vice-president and general manager of Asia-Pacific.

According to this article from the UK, “Almost four months after its acquisition by Attachmate Group, Novell’s EMEA channel chief has opened up about the vendor’s vision for its indirect channel.” It is funny to see him act like a PR person, whose claims of success are very hard to ingest. Attachmate has basically done just about nothing to help Novell’s products. It’s not clear why Attachmate bought Novell in the first place; maybe someone just needed to take the non-patents part of Novell (the patents went to Microsoft) and do the least possible with it (as that competes against Microsoft). Who benefits from this? Surely not Attachmate. Remember who funded this acquisition. █

Summary: GroupWise abandoned while staff associated with it abandons the company; not only Microsoft gains from it as GNU/Linux companies too capitalise on Novell’s erosion

A lot of Novell staff fled or got canned. Well, now the business is lost, as expected. Hardly any boycott is needed at this stage; Novell is in a free fall and Attachmate seems apathetic about it.

Ken Muir left some days ago (well, the announcement at least came then) and almost everyone else at A- B- and C-level management already left. Muir was a key GroupWise person.

“NSW Health to dump Novell GroupWise,” tells us a pro-FOSS journalists whose reporting we typically enjoy. Sadly, as he explains, it’s Microsoft which gains here and:

Who knows what treasures can be found buried there [GroupWise], amongst the musty trappings of the past covered in dust? What glories await? What ghosts of the past?

This can also be found here and the original report is here. Attachmate remains quiet on GroupWise, which competes against Microsoft.

In other news from Australia, Novell continues to market the ZENworks product line (proprietary) and a lot of the news was flooded by the marketing PR Novell had paid some firm to generate. There are new faces in Novell’s PR blog, Michele Hudnall and Kim Lorusso, both promoting proprietary software

The importance and relevance of all this is that Novell gets punished for a bad strategy and for Boycott Novell the plan was to have Novell’s GNU/Linux business shifted to companies that do not help Microsoft. The site hopes that it is benefiting companies that do not pay Microsoft for Linux and thus provides an incentive to antagonise the patent extortion. Watch what bankers say about Red Hat right now:

The firm notes Linux shipments are expected to outpace both Windows and UNIX in CY2011 and the acquisition of Novell by Attachmate in November 2010 could help Red Hat increase its market share.

That is a good thing because Red Hat does not pay anything to Microsoft. █

Summary: Ken Muir moves from Novell to GWAVA where he will serve as CEO And CTO

THE OTHER day we asked readers whether we should leave Boycott Novell aside while dealing with more important and pressing issues (mostly software patents). Well, although Linux Today chose this article for its front page, we have not received sufficient feedback on it, except from Steve Stites who wrote:

We are nearly finished

Roy Schestowitz has put the most time and effort of anybody into the effort to break the Microsoft-Novell agreement so he is the most likely voice to declare the boycott Novell movement finished. My thoughts on the status of the boycott are:

When Attachmate killed the Mono project that removed one of our two principle problems with Novell. Mono is a dead issue.

Our other principle problem with Novell is the Microsoft-Novell agreement, especially as it dealt with software patents. Attachmate has issued a general statement that they would honor all of the Novell commitments so that agreement is still in force and still applies to software distributed by SuSE. I think that we should continue the boycott until SuSE issues an acceptable statement that they are no longer bound by the terms of the Microsoft-Novell agreement, especially the terms relating to software patents.

All of the bad things that have happened to Novell, Ron Hovsepian, and the others are merely collateral damage to the boycott (and in all honesty the boycott was only one of several factors that brought Novell down). We would have been quite satisfied with killing Mono and destroying the Microsoft-Novell agreement without any personnel changes at Novell or monetary punishment for Novell.

I think that we should continue the boycott, marking time so to speak, until SuSE issues an acceptable statement that they are no longer bound by the terms of the Microsoft-Novell agreement, especially the terms relating to software patents. But yes, we have won and we are only marking time until SuSE figures out a way to get rid of the Microsoft-Novell agreement.

While Novell is still around and amid transformation (there is still emission of new adverts in YouTube) we will keep track of its staff, for example Ken Muir who has just become CEO And CTO of GWAVA. Any future for Groupwise at all? Not based on Attachmate’s actions thus far. The press release says that “Muir, 41, a former Novell executive, most recently served as CTO and Vice President of Novell’s Collaboration business where he was instrumental in building Novell’s collaboration strategy and products. Prior positions include Chief of Staff to the CEO and various engineering and product management leadership positions. Muir has over 15 years experience in the software industry ranging from engineering and development to product strategy and technology management. He brings to GWAVA strong executive leadership and extensive knowledge of enterprise messaging systems, security and compliance.”

It sure seems like The Register got its news 2 months late regarding layoffs at Novell. For those who wonder about SUSE, the OpenSUSE Conference is being handled almost single-handedly by Jos Poortvliet, based on whoever almost always blogs. The other bits of news arrive from the very few volunteers who are left. Quoting Poortvliet:

Over the last month the conference team has received a large number of proposed sessions for the openSUSE conference. However, we also realize we have not entirely capitalized on the potential for especially the ‘interactive’ sessions we wanted. So we extend the deadline with two weeks to allow more BoF, Workshop and Hack sessions to be submitted. And we’ll release some more articles to explain what we want!

OpenSUSE sought funding for this event from some unexpected sources. Will it work out? █

Summary: Microsoft FUD in Peru (against GNU/Linux, as usual) and a move towards Free software on Windows hits an impasse

“Some FUD from some Peruvian MS minions” called it Eduardo Landaveri, a key member of this site, who shows that FUD is up to its older ‘mode’ again, which no good (we wrote about Peru before). We really ought to make a video roundup of the evolution of Microsoft FUD. “It’s an interview [with] Alejandro Raffaele,” explains the source, “director de marketing de Red Hat in that country. Of course he’s supporting his company’s views but you could see that some people especially on third world countries still believe old FUD, like GNU/Linux has higher TCO, less secure, and the like… It seems that the awareness is getting a foothold in those countries but still we have to engage in counter[ing] it and setting the facts straight.” Here is the Google translation of this article.

According to a pointer sent to us from India, Geneva too, having decide to put Free software only on top of Windows (a strategic mistake Bristol had made too), decided to withdraw from it:

The IT department of the city of Geneva in Switzerland is about to stop its four-year use of open source email clients and OpenOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools, and revert to the previous, vendor dependent solutions, reports osor.eu.

Mathias Buschbeck, member of the the city council for the Greens, is submitting written questions to the mayor, arguing in favour of the current, vendor independent IT strategy and against the switch to proprietary solutions

To quote OSOR’s article about it, “Geneva [is] abandoning its open source email and office strategy” (on a proprietary platform). The yardsticks are already biased unless the software runs on its intended platform which Microsoft does not control and discriminate on, e.g. performance-wise.

I am currently working on IMAP patches (in C) that would add functionality public services may need. The problem is that they want to emulate what Microsoft is doing rather than adhere to standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), for example. █

Summary: Customers continue to replace GroupWise and Techrights wonders what Attachmate will do about the WordPerfect case

Attachmate, a Microsoft partner, has bought Novell while leaving Mono out in the cold and letting Microsoft take the patents. The thing is, Attachmate has hardly said anything about GroupWise. A tricky situation for sure as the product keeps bleeding. EAT is the latest large user to dump it. From the news: “The chain rolled out the cloud-based Apps productivity suite seven months ago to help meet its goal of doubling the size of its business. It replaced a 10-year-old Novell GroupWise system.”

There is more about it here and here:

The migration involved a move away from Novell Groupwise.

Cesar Ramanauskas, systems engineer at EAT, says in a blog post, “In preparation for our goal of doubling in size, EAT migrated to Google Apps for Business, after more than a decade of using Novell GroupWise.”

Inaction from Attachmate cannot help much, can it? But the elephants in the room are actually SUSE, the SCO case, and the Microsoft case. Will Attachmate dump the case against its partner, Microsoft? We are not sure what might happen with the antitrust case because Attachmate never mentions it and the Microsoft booster portrays it as just a “headache” when he argues:

But Microsoft’s antitrust problems aren’t ending just yet. Another old case involving WordPerfect, the once widely used word prcoessor, has been resurrected by a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling overturning a previous judgment in favor of Microsoft and allowing the case being pursued by Novell to proceed. Novell, now owned by Attachmate, owned WordPerfect for a couple of years in the mid-1990s before selling it to current owner Corel.

Some of us think that Microsoft toys around with Skype and Nvidia simply because of loose/lenient oversight. █

Summary: Assorted security news about the “biggest name and email address heist in US history” and beyond

A few days ago we wrote about the Epsilon fiasco, which is said to have affected Marks and Spencer customers, probably owing to the Windows machines getting cracked (as they so often do). What we didn’t know at the time is that this was the “biggest name and email address heist in US history”. To quote The Inquirer:

BIG US BANKS JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and US Bank are just three of the companies affected by a massive data breach at online marketing firm Epsilon.

These are just a few of the companies that do business with Epsilon, which said in a statement that its clients “were exposed by an unauthorised entry into Epsilon’s email system”.

Epsilon is a firm that sends billions of emails ads each year to people who register their interest at its customers’ websites or give their email addresses when shopping. At the moment it is unclear how many people have been affected, but Reuters claimed “it could be one of the biggest such data breaches in US history”.

According to another article:

What’s being described as a “massive” security breach at email marketing firm Epsilon has compromised the customer names and emails of some of the largest companies in the US, including seven of Fortune’s top 10 institutions, reports SecurityWeek.

Epsilon reportedly sends out 40 billion emails each year for more than 2,500 clients. SecurityWeek reports that clients of Epsilon affected by the infiltration include: TiVo, US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Capital One, Marriott Rewards, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, Citi, Brookstone, McKinsey & Co., New York & Co, Kroger and Walgreens.

It says that “Epsilon reportedly sends out 40 billion emails each year for more than 2,500 clients.” Well, earlier today a marketing (spamming) agency called 2ndimpression sent on behalf of Thornley Groves a bunch of marketing junk to clients, myself included. It did this (sent unwanted mail) without permission from the recipients, requiring non-existent usernames to unsubscribe from this endless mess. These firms deserve no sympathy. Some of them are borderline criminal, but they probably know the law well enough to manoeuvre around prosecution. To them, it’s risk analysis and reward. Microsoft Florian uses similar tactics to shower journalists with quotes to embed in articles.

In other news, universities keep getting cracked and Windows users receive malware from cracked sites. “The fake software is called the Windows Stability Center,” says the MSBBC, but they do not say that it’s only a problem for Windows users, they just say “PC” or “computer”. █

Summary: Ron Hovsepian says there is a plan for BrainShare 2011, but judging by previous years, it could still be a dead duck (called off)

THE ANNUAL event that is all about GroupWise is not being advertised this year (at least not yet), despite the fact that GroupWise is mentioned in some new pages [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15] (although as a very secondary item, as even in news about Novell mail the impression is given that GroupWise no longer has any impact). Even if the GWAVA event vanishes with Novell’s sale (it is currently planned to take place in Torrance), the man who ruined Novell wants to assure clients that BrainShare is not dead yet and there is also a press release about it (BrainShare 2011 was mentioned here recently). A couple of years ago BrainShare was called off after it had been announced and bookings were made; so there is no guarantees that BrainShare 2011 will ever materialise. Besides, why should anyone attend given that AttachMSFT is likely to trash some of Novell’s products? BrainShare 2010 is likely to have been the last ever, but we shall see… █

Update: Richard Bliss sent us the following information by mail:

I attempted to leave a comment on your latest blog concerning Novell and GWAVACon but the site didn’t accept comments.

You state that there isn’t any information about GWAVACon 2011 and suggest that it will be cancelled. GWAVACon 2011 was held January 22-26 in Torrance California with a near record attendance.

GWAVACon Europe is already receiving registration for the first week in October during Oktoberfest. You should join us.

GWAVACon 2012 has already been announced for January in Torrance again.

The one is doubt is Novell’s.

Summary: As the company prepares for the official passage of assets to AttachMSFT [sic], its customers go elsewhere on the face of it

NOVELL is all about proprietary software, except for few areas like SUSE. So the demise of those non-free/libre products (proprietary software) is never bad news, no matter who gains at Novell’s expense. The company called GroupLink was recently mentioned in relation to GroupWise and some other new press releases/articles that mentioned GroupWise were appearing in places (e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]), still offering no signs at all that anybody new is embracing GroupWise. It makes no sense given Novell’s situation as a company. In fact, quite a few companies seem to be escaping GroupWise based on the news. Here is one new story about GroupWise being replaced by Microsoft:

Excel spreadsheets for customer relationship management were replaced by Salesforce.com Inc.’s hosted CRM product in less than a year. Novell Inc.’s GroupWise collaboration software was replaced by Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which was integrated with SharePoint collaboration software within a year.

Lakewood City government is also pulling the plug on Novell:

For example, the city recently switched over from a Novell computer network server to a Microsoft one.

And another example from the news:

A t the retreat, board members were briefed on an anti-bullying program and plans to switch the division’s computers from a Novell operating system to one produced by Microsoft. The transition will be finished this summer and cost about $2 million, officials said.

Novell’s loss is not always Microsoft’s gain. Sometimes it is Google’s gain as this article from a few days ago helps show:

Novell will probably be shut off for a few days after the switch, and Bonvillain said students will not be able to send e-mails from the account after this point. It may show that an e-mail has been sent, but it will likely never be received.

Novell is being stripped off in all sorts of places. As for the NOVL stock, which has little lifetime left, it is staying stable based on the most recent financial news [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The deterioration of Novell’s market may simply be in line with expectations, which are tellingly not high. █

Summary: KIN Data Service is dead; Now that Microsoft blames not an unnamed party but actually accuses — along with its boosters — the ‘client state’ Yahoo!, there is rejection of accountability

Vista Phony 7 [sic] is supposed to cancel, erase, or annul all memories of the disastrous KIN, which has got to be one of the least successful products to ever come out of Microsoft. “Microsoft Kills Disastrous KIN Phone’s Data Service” based on this article which Girts has just mailed us. It says:

…the ill-fated KIN project was neither well received nor hot selling.

Microsoft’s major booster Rafael Rivera was spinning another mobile disaster for Microsoft. It’s that “phantom data” glitch which Microsoft tried to blame Yahoo! for. Well, guess what? As usual, Microsoft’s blame games are far from trivial:

Later on Tuesday, Yahoo issued another statement, this time shifting some of the blame to Microsoft. “Yahoo! Mail is widely available on tens of millions of mobile phones, including those running on Apple iOS, Android, Nokia Symbian, and RIM,” Yahoo said in a statement to CNET. “The issue on the Windows Phones is specific to how Microsoft chose to implement IMAP for Yahoo! Mail and does not impact Yahoo! Mail on these other mobile devices.”

Let us remember that Yahoo! is partly run by former Microsoft executives and VMware is the same although now there are changes at the top (which is already occupied by several Microsoft veterans):

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, VMware said that Maritz is no longer president of the company, but rather just the chief executive officer. And now he has four co-presidents reporting to him. Carl Eschenbach, who was previously VMware’s executive vice president of worldwide field operations, is now co-president of customer operations. Richard McAniff, who used to be executive vice president of products and chief development officer, is co-president of products and chief development officer. Tod Nielsen, who came to VMware after a long stint at Microsoft like Maritz, was VMware’s chief operating officer, and he’s now co-resident of applications platform. Mark Peek, who was chief financial officer, is co-president of business operations and chief financial officer.

There are some other Microsoft executives in VMware’s management. What’s interesting is that Yahoo! does not just sit back while Microsoft passes blame. Things just don’t go Microsoft’s way nowadays. █

Summary: Poor material from Google News and Novell’s role in generating it

Lies about Red Hat and others were spread recently by the Novell-funded Lighthouse Research. Even though this was mentioned and perhaps debunked before, some sites carry on publishing the press release [1, 2]. How much is Novell paying for this? One item that was also mentioned before is this press release about Asian games (this press release is masquerading as an ‘article’, so compare to the original press release). How pathetic of Novell and the so-called ‘press’…

Here is a new article (not redressed press release which says: “We first saw this with Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) several years ago. When Windows came along, developers stopped writing for Novell.”

Novell does not quite know what to do now. It works in many different areas but masters none of those.

Dipto Chakravarty, VP of Engineering at Novell, talks about “Log Management in the Cloud” which is just a Fog Computing buzzwords-filled term for monitoring. Novell is also trying IDM, but apart from this recent partnership with Verizon, there is no evidence that Novell has made a dent. To quote: “It seems Verizon is one of the leaders in thinking about ID management as a differentiator, already partnering with Novell, for instance, to offer Novell’s identity management and application access controls for use as an on-demand service supplied from the Verizon cloud.”

Novell’s IDM is advertised here in an article that says:

Cooley’s identity and e-mail infrastructure, based on Novell GroupWise and supported by Novell’s eDirectory service, had worked well for internally-hosted services, supporting 3,500 students and 500 faculty and staff, said Greg Colegrove, director of IT operations at the law school. The problem, he explained, was that “we just could not respond quickly enough to the things we were asked for” in areas such as smartphone integration and other items touching on collaboration and mobility.

[...]

The solution was Novell Identity Manager, an IDM (identity-management) tool formerly known as DirXML.

The whole article seems more like an advertisement, not a case of reporting. IDC, which is paid by Novell, has its “analyst” Brett Waldman write for Novell PR. How improper. Other PR people advertise Pulse/Vibe, which they put out there with a press release that’s conveniently parroted by shoddy Web sites that don’t do investigative work, they just repeat Novell’s own claims:

Novell cited that more than 9,500 customers have purchased or renewed its lean and cost effective collaboration solutions in 2010, thereby generating increased return on investment.

There is a lot of very shallow repetition of the press release without any doubts expressed or an investigation taking place [1, 2, 3]. This is the type of ‘journalism’ people are exposed to these days. A word-to-word comparison helps reveal that the news is written by the companies covered (or their PR agents).

Here is a bunch of coverage about GroupWise. Almost all of it is just press releases, sometimes with slight tweaks on those, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. CompanionLink is still flooding the news feeds with such press releases that mention GroupWise, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Here is the rewritten press release from tmcnet.com, which is a site mostly composed from such press releases that it pretends to be news articles. If Internet news has real reporting outnumbered by press releases (by a factor of about 1:3), what does it say about new/digital media? Here is an example of a real article which mentions GroupWise by stating: “Students and faculty at the school automatically have an email address made for them through Novell’s GroupWise system upon registration.”

ZenWorks was covered by IDG [1, 2], but it was hardly covered at all this January. Microsoft/SCO booster Rob Enderle says that Novell will “broken up and sold in part.” Well, this time for a change he got something right. Novell is extremely vulnerable right not and it’s not just due to vulnerabilities in its products. All Novell has got left is marketing spin. █

THIS is today’s last post about Novell, which is also the last Microsoft patent sellout to vanish anyway (Linspire, Xandros, and Turbolinux are out of the scene already).

Novell failed to grow its presence in the GNU/Linux space by signing a deal with Microsoft. Novell also continues to see its old business fade away. While Google drops Wave, which Novell tried to capitalise on using Pulse/Vibe, there is this announcement about Vibe OnPrem. Novell is hoping to sell GroupWise (proprietary) using free/open source code from Google, just as IBM uses some IM toys to sell Lotus. According to this Bomgar PR, “Novell Implements Collaborative Remote Support from Bomgar” (has anyone heard of it?).

Novell’s inability to provide real value in the mail and collaboration space (hardly any new clients are reported) may help Microsoft gain globally although some clients move to Google: “SOU switched to Google Apps because it is free for higher education institutions. Officials say it will save the university thousands of dollars every year. It will save the university about $2,500-a-year in energy costs, $18,000 in three years to not replace servers, and $35,000 annually for dropping their current contract with Novell GroupWise.”

Novell is still advertising GroupWise 8, possibly the last-ever release of the product. Here is another rush towards Google — this time a move away from Microsoft:

It is understood that Flight Centre’s 6000-plus employees will transition from Microsoft Outlook over to Google’s web-based Gmail system.

The US government too moves to Google [1, 2] as its tools improve [1, 2] and more clients fall into its proprietary software trap. Here is the latest update that we found about the LA migration:

Google also needs to add other functions to the e-mail service, such as auto-generation of confirmation receipts, especially for messages about legal matters such as subpoenas, McCarthy said. Without that feature, some employees had to retain access to the older Novell GroupWise e-mail system, he said.

Apart from the above, GroupWise hardly got mentioned in December, except perhaps in the context of Blackberry, Lepide migration tools [1, 2, 3], and CompanionLink’s sync [1, 2] that supports Novell GroupWise and Linux too. Well, Android form of Linux anyway [1, 2, 3, 4].

Novell’s decline is said to be global and according to IDG (more here), despite the WordPerfect case, Novell continues to depend on Microsoft, which is paying it for services (and maybe more compensation in the future).

The department is currently using a mixture of Windows and Novell technologies.

Novell is also mentioned in the article “Cloud Identity Trends in 2011″, this one about Softline (“virtualisation and Novell technologies” noted), and another one about AttachMSFT. That second one says:

Softline AG said Wednesday that it has taken over the profitable Norwegian IT service provider STOVER AS, a renowned specialist in identity management, security, virtualisation and Novell technologies with its head office in Oslo and a branch in Elverum.

Identity Manager has new vulnerabilities. Novell’s proprietary software gets rusty while management staff flees. █

Summary: SPAM volume doubles because of “compromised Windows machines”, which makes it by far the biggest problem

DEBATING HypeOS and Android security is a little misguided because in both operating systems, in order for threat to materialise, the user is typically required to actually install rogue applications. Trend Micro oughtn’t ignore the elephant in the room, which is also what its business seems to depend on. According to this report [via], SPAM has just doubled again because of “compromised Windows machines.”

Spam volumes have returned to normal following a holiday lull that saw a drastic reduction of junk mail.

The Rustock botnet is out of hibernation and back in business, spewing copious volumes of useless junk mail courtesy of hundreds of thousands of compromised Windows machines.

Rustock (which specialises in spamvertising unlicensed pharmaceutical websites) is the biggest single source of global spam. Its return on 10 January resulted in the doubling (98 per cent increase) of global junk mail volumes over the course of just 24 hours, MessageLabs reports.

Some believe that one in two Windows PCs is a zombie PC. That is some stunning number. █